All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will
work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
- [Work]

All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is
still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read.
We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we
learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the
place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is
the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all
manner of professors have done their best for us. The true
university of these days is a collection of books.
- [Education]

An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens
the darker here on earth grows the night.
- [Religion]

At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such
conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone
confusedly dumb and quiet.
- [History]

Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual
backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories
for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
- [Authorship]

Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star
visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all
intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this
otherwise!
- [Morality]

Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and
constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies,
crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us
have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and
mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.
- [America]

Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a
head that already understands and knows.
- [Facts]

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
- [Conviction]

Eternity looks grander and kinder if Time grow meaner and more
hostile.
- [Eternity]

Ever as before does madness remain, terrific, altogether
infernal, boiling up of the nether chaotic deep, through this
fair painted vision of creation, which swims thereon, and which
we name the real.
- [Insanity]

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music
and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a
dirge, or a life march, as you will.
- [Day]

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in
the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and
obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of
an ideal.
- [Poets]

Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance;
inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
- [Evil]